Madrid (EFE).- 31% of students in the 4th year of Primary Education in Spain live in homes with a maximum of 25 books -ten percentage points more than, for example, the Czech Republic or Norway-, and at the opposite extreme a 15% of these students between the ages of 9 and 10 have more than 200 books at home.
Difference in proportions of books in households between communities
In the category of more than 200 books, only Madrid (23%) exceeds the proportion of 1 in 5 students who have at least 200 books at home, compared to the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla, where less than 1 in 10 students in this situation.
These are some of the results at the regional level of the International Study of Progress in Reading Comprehension (PIRLS), of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, the largest carried out worldwide -57 countries and 400,000 students – to assess this capacity of the child in his fourth year of schooling.
In Spain, which has participated in PIRLS since 2006, this course is equivalent to the 4th year of Primary Education. In the latest edition of PIRLS, only Andalusia, the Principality of Asturias, the Canary Islands, Castilla y León, Catalonia, Ceuta, the Community of Madrid, Melilla and the Foral Community of Navarra have taken part in the study voluntarily.
According to the analysis of the data published today by the Ministry of Education, 24% of the primary school students in Asturias live in families with a maximum of 25 books, in Madrid the figure is 25%; 26% in Castilla y León and 31% in Andalusia.
At the other pole, close to one in two students from the Canary Islands (49%) have a maximum of 25 volumes at home and this percentage is higher than 60% in Melilla and Ceuta.
15% of children live in homes with more than 200 volumes
On the other hand, in Spain, 15% of students in the 4th year of Primary School live in homes with more than 200 volumes, a percentage approximately equal to that of France, Latvia, Bulgaria or Cyprus, and 6-7 percentage points above Turkey and Croatia.
The difference between the average performance in reading comprehension of students whose home has more than 200 works and a maximum of 25 is high in all countries, although with notable variations: from the difference of more than 75 points in Bulgaria (87 points). and Austria (76 points), less than 50 points behind Latvia (38 points).
In Spain, this difference is 55 points, in the same order as Norway, Finland or Portugal. Among the participating autonomous communities, the smallest differences occurred in Navarra (39 points), the Canary Islands (40 points) and Asturias (44 points).
On the other hand, only one in ten students in the 4th year of Primary Education in Spain (11%) is included in the category “I don’t like to read”, well below both the OECD-28 Average (30%) and the EU Total. (twenty-one %).
In the regions participating in PIRLS 2021, more than half of the students really like to read, with the exception of Catalonia (44%).
Students who like to read a lot obtain, in all cases, better scores than their peers who do not.